Among the other dark legends of Kemmesa, the legend of Katrina Calavera, the Ghost Bride, is particularly terrifying. Those who fear even to speak her name call her the Bone Bride. And their fear is well founded.
Once a year, when the veil separating the world of the living from the world of the dead becomes thinner than a spider's web, she emerges from the thickest fog. Her appearance is a masterpiece of macabre art: her body, with the help of whitewash and India ink, is transformed into the illusion of a perfect skeleton, crowned with a doll's face with empty eye sockets. Instead of a wedding bouquet, she holds a bunch of tiny, highly polished skulls strung on the stems of long-decayed roses. It is believed that each of them contains the soul of an innocent murdered person, whose executioner escaped retribution.
Silently gliding through the sleeping streets, she searches. And when Calavera's shadow falls on the house where the sinner hides, the skulls in the bouquet begin to emit a quiet, chilling ringing. It's a sign.
Katrina doesn't enter the house. She appears at the window. And then the killers awaken from their nightmare and begin to feel the chill of her icy breath on their skin. They hear the chorus of their victims' whispers ringing from her horrific bouquet. They see her frozen smile behind the glass and realize with absolute clarity: their crime is not forgotten. The eternal memory of the dead has finally caught up with them. And this ghostly, inexorable vengeance—the curse of an eternal reminder—is far more terrible than a swift and merciful death.
With the first rays of the sun, it dissolves like a nightmare, leaving behind only the sweet, putrid smell of withered roses and the ingrained fear in the hearts of those who hoped to escape justice.